Sunday was so quiet. After four days of sometimes frenetic, more often attention-taxing activity, Minnesota’s U.S. Senate recount teams took a deserved day of rest. A thrilling Minnesota Independent traffic spike from a Huffington Post pickup of story I wrote about U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s Friday press conference was over. With nothing better to do, I decided to read the nine pages of comments — 209 in all — at HuffPo. I was surprised to find most seemed devoted to calling Coleman (whose “I’m a winner” quote was in the headline) either a “wiener” or a “whiner.” The gags are about equally funny or lame, but which one prevailed? Time for a recount.

Out of 209 ballots cast, only 36 directly addressed the issue at hand. A total of 21 voters considered Coleman a wiener, while a dozen opined that Coleman was in fact a whiner. Then there were three overcount ballots on which voters stated that he was both a wiener and a whiner, or else tried to switch their votes, midcomment, from wiener to whiner or vice versa. Those three do not count.

Which leaves a shockingly large number of ballots  – 173, to be precise — as undervotes on the question of whether Norm Coleman is a wiener or a whiner. Drilling down, however, I found that a significant proportion of those comments clustered on the topic of Coleman’s teeth, which had figured prominently in the photo HuffPo editors selected to accompany the story. Drawing more than a quarter of the undervote, dental commentary played essentially the same role in the HuffPo wiener/whiner plebiscite as Dean Barkley’s Independence Party candidacy is playing in the Senate recount. Which is to say, none.

Meanwhile, readers with something serious to say found their way to MnIndy to read the entire article rather than only the three paragraphs HuffPo had excerpted. In MnIndy’s less-crowded comment space, the usual erudition and backbiting focused on energy policy — the ostensible topic of Coleman’s presser. Of the 33 comments, only two seemed to have arrived at the wrong precinct: Wiener and whiner each received one vote at MnIndy. Having exhausted myself tallying the results at HuffPo, I’m going to leave this one an unrecounted tie.